We Are Missing the Point of John Boehner’s Resignation

Thomas
Fleming discusses the story of General Ludwig Beck’s resignation in protest in
his book, The New Dealers’ War, FDR and the War Within World War II. His
article on General Ridgway in MHQ, The Quarterly Journal of Military History,
was the first to recognize his genius as a leader of men. .

I fear a great many people, including the
editors of the Washington Post, do
not understand the significance of Speaker of the House John Boehner’s
resignation. The Post, in a recent article
by Karen Tumulty, grouped him with speakers who were “forced out.” But no one forced Boehner to resign. The Tea
Party extremists in his own Republican Party have not demanded his scalp. On
the contrary, his unconfrontational style led them to assume they could commit
almost any ruinous blunder, from alienating woman voters by defunding Planned
Parenthood to shutting down the government, and he would accept their behavior
because they had a majority of the votes.

Boehner once described his Speaker’s job
as “to look out over the horizon and make sure I know where we’re going.” He obviously was appalled by what he saw over
the political horizon if the Tea Party fanatics and their fellow extremists got
their way. Some people, with different temperaments, might have chosen to fling
furious denunciations, to virtually ignite a civil war within the Republican
Party. Boehner saw that would only lead to another kind of ruin for the party
to which he had devoted so many years of his life. Resignation in Protest was a move that suited
his self-effacing temperament – and held out at least the hope that it might
shock some of the extremists into rethinking their reckless approach to
politics.

Resignation in protest is not an American
tradition. It has seldom been invoked by leaders in this country. Perhaps the
most noteworthy example was done so smoothly, most people did not recognize
it. Which was fine for the man who did
the resigning -- Army Chief of Staff General Matthew Ridgway. In the mid-
nineteen fifties, he announced he would not accept another term as chief of
staff. This was extraordinary in several
ways. By that time Ridgway was the most famous soldier of his era. He had
rescued South Korea from a Chinese Communist invasion that had left General
Douglas MacArthur in a panicky daze.

The one man to whom Ridgway wanted to send
a message heard it loud and clear. President Dwight Eisenhower was reportedly
infuriated by Ridgway’s decision. He knew exactly what it meant. Ridgway was
telling him he was dangerously weakening the American Army by shifting too much
money into the greedy hands of the U.S. Air Force. The army’s early performance
in Vietnam would soon confirm Ridgway’s opinion. But he never said another word
about it. Ridgway was on the record in
the one place that mattered to him – the minds and hearts of his fellow
soldiers.

In other nations, resignations in
protest are still rare, but somewhat more common. Perhaps the most famous in
the 20th century was the resignation of Colonel General Ludwig Beck,
the German Army’s chief of staff as Adolf Hitler prepared to invade Poland and
soon afterward, Russia. Beck did not think Germany could win the war,
especially if the British and French – and quite probably the Americans, came
into the game on the western front.

Like Ridgway, Beck never went public with
his disagreement. But he recognized Hitler as a monster of unparalleled evil
and devoted the next five years to organizing a conspiracy to kill the Führer
and extract Germany from his ruinous war. Alas, the bomb that was designed to eliminate
Hitler in 1944 failed to do the job. When younger officers turned against the
conspirators, Beck died by his own hand.

Let us wish John Boehner a far happier
fate. He is obviously a man who cares
deeply about his country. We can only hope that his party’s extremists discover
the meaning of resignation in protest before it is too late.